Eugenia

Step 1: Use a youtube tutorial for the basic commands. Don’t worry, you’ll forget about them soon enough. But doing them once, helps with muscle memory. Step 2: When in need to do something, copy/paste from Q&A/forums various commands that they suggest for your problem. Your basic knowledge from step1 will come back as you do that.

After a few days, you’ll be understanding what’s going on and how the whole thing works in an abstract level.

I prefer the UI of Shotcut, but kdenlive is admittedly more powerful. You can try both to see which one you prefer. I suggest you download the .appimage files of both of them from the website (this way you’ll get the latest versions). I’d suggest against the flatpak versions as sometimes they come with limitations of various kinds. Just download their respective .appimage files, make them executable (right click on the downloaded files with your file manager and then go to their Properties to set them as executable), and then double click them to load. If you go that route, make sure you manually update them every 3 months or so, as that’s when they usually release updates.

Windows apps (particularly ones that require that kind of acceleration) are unlikely to work with Wine. And if they do, either they’ll be crashy, or they can break at any consequent Wine update. Forget Windows apps. Windows games that are invoking only fullscreen 3D are much more likely to work on Linux because the part that gets re-interpreted is simpler. But apps, that use obscure optimization Windows APIs are a pain to get good support of.

So, I suggest you install kdenlive or Shotcut to do video editing. Even Davinci resolve is a hit or miss on Linux and it doesn’t support AAC at all. So get it done with the two OSS apps I suggested instead. In another life I was a music video director for local bands, and so I was doing a lot of color grading, invoking tricks and things that FOSS apps can’t do. I switched full time to Linux and FOSS apps, and I just do the basic color grading now. It was sad to see that part of the fun go, but that’s what I had to do.

Additionally Filmora is a primarily Chinese company, probably mining data, so it’s best to not use it. Same for CapCut.

These are just dependencies for your packages. However, Arch doesn’t automatically clean the downloaded files after installation so that ends up taking space. On my Dell laptop that has only a 64 GB eMMC, the installation package files took and whopping 5 GB of space, sitting there doing nothing. I nuked them (it didn’t remove the installed apps and libs, only the already used package files). Run: sudo pacman -Scc

If this happens to Windows as well, it’s unlikely that it’s Fedora’s fault. Something else is at play.

That is a too old of a laptop. In reality, modern Linux distros run well in anything newer than 10-15 years. Yes, there are distros that you can install into it, but they won’t be the latest and greatest distros of today. They’d be instead distros made specifically for old computers, and these distros are usually more complex because they lack all the gui tools found on newer distros.

First you need to find out if your CPU is 32bit or 64 bit, and if it can take a minimum of 2 GB of RAM (if yes, upgrade it too). Then, I’d suggest you download the right file from here: https://www.q4os.org/downloads1.html I find Q4OS to be the best for old computers (more gui tools), but you’d need that minimum of 2 GB of ram to load a browser and be comfortable with 3-5 tabs (no more than that though or you’ll hit the swap). Also, consider Falkon or Chromium as a browser, they use less ram than firefox (people have downvoted me for saying that in the past, but it’s my experience).

Personally, I’d get a used laptop for $150 from the last 10 years, and install Linux on that. It should be way faster than your Asus laptop. Just make sure it has 8 GB of RAM to be comfortable with modern Linux distros (Linux Mint can work adequately with 4 GB of RAM, unless you want to do video editing).

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Not greatly. The games that have anti-cheat won’t work on Linux. Anti-cheat is a security problem anyway (because they circumvent the kernel policies) and so linux will never support these.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

for the ones that work yes. There’s a list of how well games work on linux, there’s a website for that.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

For some “difficult” non-anti-cheat games there are some workarounds. If we’re talking about apps and not games, then it’s best to use the Linux equivalents, and forget the Windows ones.

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

While there’s WINE and .NET for Linux, Windows apps don’t really work well. They usually break on new wine versions, or they don’t work at all. For apps, use Linux native apps. Games generally work better than apps because they don’t use too many of the Windows APIs (they’re mostly 3D stuff, and not app apis).

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

It depends on the distro. Some distros have graphical front ends, some you have to use the terminal to update the OS.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

There’s ClamAV, and also you should be turning the firewall On (some distros come with it, others you have to install it manually). Don’t downloads random binary packages, only from the distro itself, or official packages.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Overall, yeah… but it does depend on the version of the driver, distro you’re using, hardware etc. I use Intel graphics cards (dedicated) because I find their drivers to be more mature than nvidia’s, for example.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

Very unlikely, near zero.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

Everyone is recommended to start with Linux Mint, because it’s the distro with the most GUI front-end tools to do stuff. Yes, there are some distros that are more game-oriented, but they expect the user to know what they’re doing. Start with Mint.

Here’s the first duckduckgo search result on this question: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-deb-apt-ubuntu-22-04

You need to start with Linux mint. The errors you are mentioning are common in ubuntu, crashes happen and popup all the time on my ubuntu installations too. But never on Mint. Mint is based on the stable version of ubuntu, that it has long term support and it’s regularly getting updates to make it even more stable and secure. So please start with Mint, or Debian 12 (although Mint is better for new users).